r matrix individual shift operations of elements

Question

I am trying to optimize some code that I have written as it is very slow for large datasets. I am not sure if the following can be done with matrix operations and I would appreciate if someone had any suggestions to make it faster.

I have a matrix with zeros and integers and I would like to shift down the entries of the individual columns by the absolute number of the integer in the the entry.

   [,1] [,2] [,3]
[1,]    0    0    0
[2,]    0   -4    0
[3,]    4    0    0
[4,]   -3   -2    0
[5,]    0    2   -1
[6,]    2   -2    0
[7,]    0    0    0
[8,]   -3   -3    0  

The code I am using is the following:

#data
A<-matrix(data=c(0,0,4,-3,0,2,0,-3,0,-4,0,-2,2,-2,0,-3,0,0,0,0,-1,0,0,0),nrow=8,ncol=3)

#shift function
shift<-function(x)
{
  #create the output matrix
  out<-matrix(data=0,nrow=8,ncol=1)

  #for loop to create the shift matrix
  for(i in seq(1,8,by=1))
  {
    if(i+abs(x[i])<=8)
    {
      #find the non zero
      if(x[i]!=0)
      {
        #if there is already a number put zero  
        if(out[i+abs(x[i]),1]!=0)
        {
          out[i+abs(x[i]),1]=0
        } else {
          #shift
          out[i+abs(x[i]),1]=x[i]
        }
      }
    }
  }

  #return object
  return(out)
}

#run the logic
shift_mat<-sapply(1:ncol(A),FUN=function(k) shift(A[,k]))

and the result is:

   [,1] [,2] [,3]
[1,]    0    0    0
[2,]    0    0    0
[3,]    0    0    0
[4,]    0    0    0
[5,]    0    0    0
[6,]    0    0   -1
[7,]    0    2    0
[8,]    2   -2    0

The rules are the following for every column:

1. starting from the top find first entry that is different than zero
2. shift down by the absolute numbers of that entry
3. if there is another entry at the targeted point put zero
4. repeat for the next column

Thanks,

Nikos

Answer 1

This is a bit cleaner and about 40% faster using your example on my machine. Maybe the speed improvement will be greater using your larger data?

You should use a matrix of integers. It uses less memory and some operations are faster:

A <- matrix(as.integer(c(0,0,4,-3,0,2,0,-3,0,-4,0,-2,2,
                        -2,0,-3,0,0,0,0,-1,0,0,0)), nrow = 8, ncol = 3)

Each column is a vector, so should be your output. I replaced matrices with vectors. Also made your code more robust without the hardcoded number of rows:

shift <- function(x) {
  n <- length(x)
  y <- rep(0L, n)
  for(i in seq_len(n)) {
    if (x[i] == 0L) next
    j <- i + abs(x[i])
    if (j > n) next
    y[j] <- if (y[j] != 0L) 0L else x[i]
  }
  return(y)
}

You can run it using apply:

shift_mat <- apply(A, 2, shift)